1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates in general to telecommunications management, and more particularly to a web-based application for controlling routing of inbound toll free telephone calls through a telecommunications network for automatic call distribution to service centers or other operations.
2. Background Art
Major telecommunications service entities, e.g., MCI, AT&T, and Sprint, presently provide network planning and configuration products for monitoring multiple systems or call centers to their customers predominantly through a Windows-based graphical user interface resident on their computer workstations. For example, MCI's configuration management and AT&T's routing control service both provide 3270 emulation packages that offer the customer the ability to dynamically control the routing of their toll free services. Via the existing products, customers may specify routing conditions such as a sequence of alternate sites or trunk groups where calls may be routed if a primary site is busy and already handling maximum calls allowed. Alternate routes are then searched in specified order looking for a site to take a call. Other products offer the ability to queue calls until a customer site is able to take a call. The length of the gueue may be defined by a customer. Yet other products offer customers load balancing ability throughout a network, from a PC-based workstation at their sites.
MCI currently provides its customers with a call manager workstation for providing various call routing management capabilities, including the ability to: provision toll free numbers, destinations, automatic call distributor (ACD) information, automatic number identification (ANI) lists, routing groups, caller entered digits (CED) lists and user defined variables; display individual and agent group data; display termination cause values which are numeric codes that relate to a specific reason for routing a call, e.g., time out, normal routing, etc.; display system and application alarms; and display graphic or tabular ACD and regular peg-count data.
With the existing products, however, service entity customers typically need to directly dial-up, e.g., via a modem, or, alternatively, via dedicated communication lines, e.g., ISDN, T-1, etc., to the entity's application and database servers, and initiate the network management application through the graphical user interface (GUI). Frequently, a dial-up modem and communications software interact with each other in many ways which are not always predictable to a custom application, requiring extensive troubleshooting and problem solving for an enterprise desiring to make a legacy system available to the customer, particularly where various telephone exchanges, dialing standards or signal standards are involved.
In addition, the aforementioned software is very hardware specific, and customers generally have a wide range of workstation vendors, which requires extensive inventory for distribution, and generally, intensive customer hand holding through initial setup and installation before reliable and secure sessions are possible. If the customer's hardware platform changes through an upgrade, many of these issues need renegotiation. Accordingly, it is highly desirable to integrate the existing call management client-server application in a Web-based platform which provides expedient, comprehensive and more secure data access and reporting services to customers from any Web browser on any computer workstation anywhere in the world.
The present invention is one component of an integrated suite of customer network management and report applications using the Internet and a World Wide Web (“WWW” or “Web”) Web browser paradigm. Introduced to the communications industry as the “networkMCI Interact,” the integrated suite of Web-based applications provides an invaluable tool for enabling customers of a telecommunications enterprise to manage their telecommunication assets, quickly and securely, from anywhere in the world. In addition, the present invention has a capacity of functioning outside the integrated suite, i.e., as a standalone entity.
The popularity of the public Internet provides a measure of platform independence for the customer, as the customer can run his/her own Internet Web browser and utilize his/her own platform connection to the Internet to enable service. This resolves many of the platform hardware and connectivity issues in the customer's favor, and lets the customer choose their own platform and operating system. Web-based programs can minimize the need for training and support since they utilize existing client software, i.e. a Web browser, which the user has already installed and already knows how to use. Moreover, there is no longer a need to produce and distribute voluminous hard copies of documentation, including software user guides. Further, if the customer later changes that platform, then, as soon as the new platform is Internet enabled, service is restored to the customer. The connectivity and communications software burden is thus resolved in favor of standard and readily available hardware and the browser and dial-up software used to obtain the public Internet connection.
An Internet delivered paradigm obviates many of the installation and configuration problems involved with initial setup and configuration of a customer workstation, since the custom application required to interface with the legacy system can be delivered via the public Internet and run within a standard Web browser, reducing application compatibility issues to browser compatibility issues.
For the enterprise, the use of off-the-shelf Web browsers by the customer significantly simplifies the enterprise burden by limiting the client development side to screen layouts and data presentation tools that use a common interface enabled by the web browser. Software development and support resources are thus available for the delivery of the enterprise legacy services and are not consumed by a need for customer support at the workstation level.